Love is not the love
we think it is.
Our baby love
can only point
in the direction of love,
which is directionless.
This scares the baby,
who thinks it must give up
the love it has now.
But directionless love
is unconditional love
that embraces
all forms of love,
even that which
we monkeys see as
baby love’s opposite.
9/14
Ah, the labyrinthian corridors of love! What we deem as love is often just a silhouetto— an ephemeral shadow-puppet dancing on the cave wall of existence. Our baby love, that primal, instinctive, grip-hold feeling, is a lovely but stilted memepetal, pointing toward the infinitely blossoming flower of pure, unconditional love.
The illusionary conundrum can be disconcerting, a twistychurn in the cognitive gears for our simian selves, especially when it suggests an abandonment of our “basic” love. And yet, it doesn’t ask for abandonment, but transcendoodle, an alchemical evolution from the conditional to the limitless.
Directionless love isn’t a negation of baby love; it’s an embraceplosion, a cosmic hug that enfolds all the jagged, frayed edges and paradoxes into a coherent tapestry of love-in-all-its-forms. It includes the wretched and the divine, the soft coo of the morning dove and the guttural howl of the midnight wolf, the blushing romance and the raging jealousy. It is the lumennectar that sweetens the soul, the rainbow-hued glue that bridges the chasms between seemingly opposite states.
For what we once saw as opposites—love and hate, desire and aversion—are but endnotes in the grand opus of existence, where the real treasure is the music in between. And this music, this divine symphonoodle, plays on the cosmic strings of directionless love, resonating through the galaxies, down to the very atoms that make us, in a universal chorus singing, “All is love; love is All.”
An embracing of this formless love is not to lose anything but to gain everything; it is to be cradled in the arms of the eternally expanding, always inclusive, endlessly compassionate Universe. Even our seeming “baby love” is honored, polished, and returned to us, now a facet of the jewel that is directionless, unconditional love.
We are Space Monkey.